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Preparation for 
Foreign Missionary Service 


An Address to 


Student Volunteers 


By 
PAUL W. HARRISON, D.Sc., M.D., F.A.C.S. 


StuDENT VOLUNTEER MoveMENT FOR Foreicn Missions 
25 Madison Avenue - - New York City 





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PREPARATION FOR FOREIGN MISSIONARY 
SERVICE 


By Paut W. Harrison 


It is our purpose, if God permit, to become foreign 
missionaries. What is more, we want to be good ones. 
We want to accomplish all the work that God Himself 
has in mind for us. How can we prepare ourselves best? 


Health 


First of all because a missionary needs a rugged and 
resistant physique, we should be willing to devote time 
and attention to securing it. In its pursuit the first word 
is a word of caution. Avoid too much attention to 
health. A missionary will be a far more effective worker 
with a weak body than with a neurasthenic mind. How- 
ard Walter of Lahore was an outstanding missionary. 
Few have done more than he to point the men of India 
to Christ, and he worked under the handicap of frail 
health and limited activity. We have all known men 
whose concern about their body has cut down their use- 
fulness to a pitiful fraction of their possibilities, 
Neurasthenia has wrecked more missionary careers than 
weak bodies. Cultivate a healthy contempt for the minor 
ills to which all flesh is heir. Refuse to think about 
yourself, either your body or your soul. 


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Nevertheless it still remains true that a rugged 
physique is an asset beyond price. Howard Walter and 
the glorious company of missionaries like him could have 
accomplished twice as much had they been better en- 
dowed physically. Health of body requires a certain 
amount of play, even for the man of eighty. It requires 
a reasonable amount of sleep. It requires regularity of 
the bowels. It requires hard steady application to the 
object of life. It requires little else. The volunteer 
who neglects these things because of his work, makes a 
mistake. The man who wastes his endowment on late 
fudge parties and talk-fests is a traitor to the Kingdom. 


Technical Preparation 


_ In the second place the Volunteer needs the best sort 
of technical preparation. The man who is willing to be 
a slovenly and careless doctor in India, and hopes to 
excuse that slovenliness by engaging in evangelistic work, 
is a dishonest hypocrite. This is not to say that none 
are wanted in the mission field except geniuses, but it is 
to say that none are wanted except faithful, hard-work- 
ing, honest workmen, who plan to do the very best they 
are capable of, in whatever activity they elect to en- 
gage. It makes comparatively little difference whether 
the Volunteer takes up medical work abroad, educational 
work, evangelistic work, or indeed, one of the more un- 
usual lines of missionary endeavor. What does matter 


4 


a great deal is the honesty, diligence and faithfulness 
with which he performs his duties. We are out there to 
introduce men to Christ. The first requisite is funda- 
mental honesty in our own character, which is only 
another way of saying that our day’s work must be of 
the sort that Christ Himself can congratulate us over. 

This seems a platitude but apparently it needs con- 
tinual re-emphasis. It was in one of the best univer- 
sities in the country that a student said to me: “I do not 
expect ever to be a really good doctor, so I plan to go 
out as a medical missionary.” Equally to be repudiated 
is that haste which cannot pause for an adequate prepa- 
ration, but desires to enter the field at once. Christ 
spent thirty years in preparation for a ministry of only a 
little more than that many months. Let us be willing to 
follow His example. 


The Spirit of Cooperation 


If remarks on health and on technical preparation 
seem trite, there are certain aspects of the preparation of 
the spirit, of whose discussion the same cannot be said. 
In the first place, we must train ourselves to work com- 
fortably with uncomfortable people. Missionaries form 
a splendid company of Christians. They are not sur- 
passed in consecration and ability by any body of men 
and women anywhere. But the crippled missionary and 
the crippled mission station whose usefulness has been 


5 


cut down to a mere fraction of what it ought to be is 
not uncommon, and the commonest cause is a lack of 
brotherly cooperation in the missionary body. It is safe 
to say that nothing so cuts down the effectiveness of the 
missionary enterprise today as this. Sometimes it is a 
matter of sensitive feelings. Personal slights, usually 
imaginary, sometimes real, cause us great distress. We 
are sure that the interests of the Kingdom of God are 
jeopardized by the unchristian attitude and actions of 
our colleagues. If we will haul out that soul pain and 
examine it in the cold light of day, it is never our zeal 
for the Kingdom of God that is found to be suffering. 
That variety of pain does not come from such a source. 
It is our own personal pride that aches that way. Few 
things are more needed by the prospective missionary 
than a thorough vulcanization of the epidermis of his 
personal feelings. Not many things we can pray for 
and work toward are more important than this, as we 
prepare to be Christ’s messengers to the uttermost parts 
of the earth. 

Sometimes it is a question of tolerance. You do not 
smoke, and your colleague smokes as if he thought it a 
means of grace. Doubtless you show better judgment 
than he on that point. But the important question is 
how you are going to react to this situation. He is not 
coming to ask your advice on the matter. No, unques- 
tionably he will continue to smoke. And are you who 


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do not smoke to divide yourself from him on that 
account, to sever all diplomatic relations, so to speak, 
and destroy the spiritual unity of the station? It was 
not an idle prayer when Christ prayed for us “That 
they may all be one, that the world may believe that 
Thou didst send me.” The mission station thus divided 
with its spiritual unity gone is in God’s sight a pitiful, 
crippled agency, a futile useless thing; not because 
someone smoked, but because someone so far failed to 
catch the spirit of Christ as to learn the first lessons of 
tolerance and forbearance and brotherhood. We must 
learn to work comfortably with uncomfortable people, to 
preserve and rejoice in unbroken Christian fellowship 
with people whose table manners offend us, whose 
political convictions irritate us, whose personality is 
disagreeable to us, whose theological outlook differs 
from our own. If our vision of Christ and our par- 
ticipation in His Spirit is not sufficient to enable us 
to rejoice in deep and lovely Christian fellowship and 
affection for our colleagues; if we cannot as disciples 
of Christ triumph over the trifles that separate us from 
one another, we would do well to come to Him for a 
deeper vision and greater grace before we apply to any 
Board to be sent out to the field. We can train ourselves 
in this. We not only can, but we must. Hardly any 
training that could be mentioned is more important. 


Race Relations in the Concrete 


As we train our spirits for the work that we trust 
lies before us, we must, in the second place, free our- 
selves from race pride, and all feeling of race superiority. 
Missionaries in the past have made some grave mistakes 
here, and the matter is far more important now than 
it was with them. All over the world aggressive na- 
tionalism is rising in a great tide, until it promises to 
become the outstanding phenomenon of the mission field. 
The Arab will endure many things, but being patronized 
by a foreigner he resents with a fierceness that is start- 
ling. The same is true of the Indian and the Chinese. 
On the other hand, the most fanatical and bigoted Arab 
melts under the approach of simple unaffected demo- 
cratic friendliness. The Arabs are perhaps as fanatical 
a race as can be found in the world today, but I have 
yet to meet one of them who could resist such an ap- 
proach. I have eaten with the Shiah river boatmen of 
the Tigris, whose religious teaching makes eating with a 
Christian a filthy and repulsive thing. It took only a 
week of common friendship to do it. A member of the 
fanatical desert brotherhood of Inland Arabia not long 
ago volunteered to act as my guide and advance agent in 
his own country, an offer that meant for him great per- 
sonal unpopularity, not to say danger, and this after an 
acquaintance of two weeks. It requires nothing except 
simple brotherly democratic association with every ele- 


8 


ment of race pride eliminated. 


This means, of course, that as far as possible the 
missionary joins with his new friends in their activities. 
It means that he seizes every opportunity to accept and 
offer hospitality. At the end of the long day’s caravan 
ride, the caravan cook turns his sheepskin saddle wrong 
side up on the sand. The hair side is down, and the 
clean side up, or at least if not clean it is hairless. This 
sheepskin he pounds in the middle with his fist, making 
a sort of dish out of it, and into this dish he pours a 
certain number of cups of flour and water, the whole 
being kneaded into dough, and shaped into a great flat 
pancake as big around as a dinner plate, and an inch or 
more thick; just as nice and light as a paving stone. 
This is baked in hot ashes for twenty minutes, and it 
makes a good, solid, substantial meal. Now the mis- 
sionary can sit off by himself and eat a sardine out of 
a tin can, if he desires, but the road into men’s hearts 
does not lie in that direction. When roasted locusts are 
served he eats roasted locusts, just as John the Baptist 
did long before. Such a missionary prays at times for 
a zinc-lined and copper-riveted stomach. It goes with- 
out saying that not everyone can go the limit on this 
program, but it should be a matter of prayer and effort 
to go just as far as possible in practice, and always the 
whole length in spirit. Our missionary success is going 
to depend on it. 


Gray Dust or Rose Tints? 


And let us train ourselves to be enthusiastic in our 
outlook on life and on our work. There are too many 
missionaries to whom life’s outlook resembles nothing 
so much as one of the roads of India in the Summer, 
before the rains have come. Everything is covered with 
a thick gray dust, and there is not one sparkle or dash 
of color in the whole landscape. Those men look for- 
ward to long years of plodding devotion to their duty, 
and devotion to duty is a magnificent thing. But Christ 
has something better than that for us, if we enter at all 
adequately into His spirit. The task to which He calls us 
is one of high lights and lovely rose tints. When we 
see it covered with gray dust, and lacking every attractive 
feature, it is simply because we have ceased to see it with 
the eyes of our Master, and have come to look on it with 
the eyes of the world. 

There is one thing perhaps more than any other that 
will help us keep the splendid colors and magnificent 
outlines of our calling clear, and that is an adequate 
comprehension of our task, and a fearless undertaking 
of the largest and hardest piece of work that our situa- 
tion offers. Every mission field has in it tasks difficult 
and magnificent. The educational missionary looks 
forward to bringing education of the right sort, and with 
it a knowledge of Christ, to every boy and girl in the 
province. The evangelistic missionary plans to bring the 


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Gospel message into every home in his entire district. 
He dreams of a united indigeneous church that shall be 
an example for the whole universal Church of Christ. 
The medical missionary dreams of setting up the King- 
dom of God in the forbidden cities where explorers 
scarcely penetrate, and where fanaticism reigns supreme. 
That is to say, these are the visions that ought to be 
ruling our lives. Too often we acquiesce in the common 
opinion that such achievements are far beyond us, are for 
our successors, and the gray dust of mediocre ambition 
and poorer accomplishment settles down on our souls 
like a pall. Let us pray for a vision of the impossible 
job; let us strive to see our field with God’s eyes, and 
take that splendid and impossible project as our own life 
mission. We are too much afraid of the big things in 
the Kingdom of God. It is the man with an impossible 
task whose enthusiasm never flags, who never loses the 
splendid rose-colored vision Christ gave him. Great 
ambitions generate great enthusiasms. 


Perennial Enthusiasm 


It is thus, too, that we shall gain a perseverance with- 
out which great things cannot be done on the mission 
field. Few men are more of a thorn in the flesh than the 
missionary who generates a magnificent new idea every 
week, forgetting in the meantime his idea of a week ago, 
and making all his enthusiasm a mockery. Such a man 


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may stir the whole station with a new plan for the 
occupation of territory or the better development of the 
work. His colleagues turn the matter over in their minds 
and are convinced that the plan has great merit. But on 
further conference it is discovered that already at the 
expiration of a week the plan has completely disap- 
peared from its author’s mind, and a successor reigns in 
its stead. That sort of missionary thinking helps nobody. 
What is needed is a calm and prayerful survey of the 
field, and an enthusiastic grappling with the largest prob- 
lems that it affords, and then a perseverance that finds 
the missionary at the expiration of twenty years still 
carrying forward the campaign with a vision and an en- 
thusiasm which has not cooled but rather increased in 
intensity and determination, with the passage of the 
years. Such a man will have his lines laid out for work 
years in advance. His vision will cover whole provinces 
as yet unreached, but which he is praying and planning 
for. That man is sharing Christ’s spirit, and is seeing 
his work through Christ’s own eyes. 


The Friendship of Christ 


There is one line of preparation, however, that is 
more important than all of these. Indeed, on it all of 
these depend. We go out to introduce men to Christ, 
and our most important preparation for that task is the 
cultivation of Christ’s friendship for ourselves. It is not 


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common for missionaries to give more time to this on 
the field than they did at home before coming out. I 
think I have known one man who found more time for 
personal devotional Bible study and prayer as a mis- 
sionary than he had found as a student. Are our present 
habits of prayer and Bible study an adequate foundation 
for the missionary career that we look forward to? 
If they are not adequate, surely nothing compares in 
importance with making them so. We forget that in 
essence misionary work is a very simple thing. The 
souls of two men come into contact. One of the two is 
the missionary, and the other is his friend in India or 
China or Arabia. In that experience of friendship, the 
man of China meets with Christ. We do well to see that 
no racial pride and conceit keep our soul from real con- 
tact with the soul of the man we wish to reach, but it 
is more important still that our own contact with Christ 
be kept so genuine and intimate that through us He 
touches men and draws them to Himself. If men are to 
come into contact with Christ when they come into con- 
tact with us, we must keep our contact with Him un- 
broken, and for most of us thirty minutes a day devoted 
to this purpose is none too much. 


Spiritual Reinforcements 


And while we are in this country, let us raise up a 
constituency which will back us up. I am not speaking 


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now of the men and women whose sacrifice pays our 
salaries, and makes the various enterprises of the mis- 
sion fields possible. That is necessary, of course, but 
there is a far more important thing. We want back of 
us men and women and children who know us and love 
us, and have confidence in us, who will put back of us 
and of the work that has been given us to do all the 
power of their spiritual lives; who will pray for us, and 
think about us and carry us on their hearts. The Apostle 
Paul needed this sort of help and so will we. Every 
one of us will face desperate and apparently hopeless 
situations. Men and women we love will be struggling 
for a footing in the Kingdom of God. The prayers and 
the spiritual help of twenty earnest children of God are 
stronger than the prayers and the spiritual help of any 
one of us. So let us get the twenty behind us. 

And finally let us remember that through all the diffi- 
culties and the perplexities of the days of preparation, as 
we follow, Christ promises to lead us. We will find 
ourselves in hard situations because He led us there. We 
may meet with temptations and trouble and humiliation 
and apparent failure. All our experiences He selects for 
us, one after the other for our development. He who 
knows all about the world and its need and all about us 
and our possibilities, is the one who prepares us and 
makes us sufficient for all the tasks He has in store for 
us. In that knowledge we can face the future with per- 


fect confidence. 
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